April 2012

March 2012

Have you ever wanted to set a price alert on all 7200RPM 1TB hard drives? Or on all Radeon HD 7970 video cards? How about any RAM modules that are DDR3-1600+, 2x4GB, and manufactured by Corsair or Kingston? Now you can with PCPartPicker parametric price alerts.

Parametric price alerts allow you to set a price alert on any part category that reflects the filter settings you want. Then if any of those items drop below your set price threshold, you'll be notified by email with a list of items that matched the criteria you configured. In the upper-right corner of every part category page is a section labelled "Parametric Price Alerts", where you can configure your alert. The alert matching criteria will match the filter settings you have for the part category list.

In addition, both normal part price alerts and parametric price alerts now take into account your preferred merchant settings, tax rates, and local-only deal availability.

Nice one. I thought of that too yesterday, without looking here, but for another site. They keep changing their prices based on what people buy. They had one time a Corsair Vengeance RAM 8 GB 1600 MHz, 9 CL for 60 euro. Now every time it's 68 or 70. And I thought it would be great if I knew when it will be again 60.

...So, will this allow me to not get 24 hour price drop alerts that are full of nothing but Amazon dropping a price by one US cent just to spam the alert? AFAIC, if a price drop isn't more than 15%, it's not worth the hassle other than getting Fry's to price match, and that's only if the savings is at least 10% and/or more than $10.00 USD, whichever's higher.

I've been contemplating some changes to the daily/weekly price drop to make it more configurable (and have it respect your merchant settings). I'll be sure to keep your feedback in mind - the <$1 drop thing has been something I've had my eye on for a while.

...I currently have one physical leg. I'm almost willing to give that leg up if you'd consider implementing an option to allow us a "threshold" point that would keep these "nickle-n-dime" tricks from spamming our mail alerts. As I said above, I've no problem with any vendor who has a serious markdown or special to offer, but using their own spambots to look at a competitor's price and knock their own down a penny/pence/peso just to make sure their product is on the mailing list...well, it ain't the universally illegal "Bait and Switch", but it's the ethical equivalent.

...On a side note, Philip - PPC has helped both myself and several friends out in designing their own systems, and has helped myself in saving a significant chunk of change on a pop-n-drop upgrade I did last year, and looks to be doing so again this year - next week, if the Socioinsecuriwelfare check comes in tomorrow as skedded! This site is a valuable resource, especially once you get past all the combo "what if?" juggling and deciding whether or not to play the "Rebate Card Raffle", and you kids need to be commended for it. I've gotten far more info and guidance here that's of an honest and professional level than I've found on supposedly "top-rated" forums such as the one over at 3D Guru, and I sincerely appreciate the services this site has provided.

Anything I can do to help - especially with getting the e-mail alerts tweakable so they can block Amazon's retarded little "penny foolish" spamming - don't hesitate to ask, eh?

Just pushed that out today - still somewhat of a work in progress. There are a half dozen there, but none of them have pricing information yet. To see them, you have to check the "show items with no price data" checkbox.

...Philip, I've got another suggestion: could we add Frys to the list of vendors that are scanned for price comparisons? Granted, they've got this "Internet Price Match Guarantee", but I'd still like to see them added to the searches just for convenience sake.

This is a great idea, and I was actually thinking of something similar for this site a few days ago...

I love how easy this tool makes it to select the cheapest of a bunch of items of certain specs. For example, finding and adding the cheapest two-pack of 1600 MHz 4GB RAM sticks takes a few seconds instead of forcing me to comb through and compare RAM myself. But what if...

WHAT IF...

Part Picker had the option for paramaterized hardware selections in a build? For example, It would be neat if I could make a build with this tool that contained the parts...

Wow, this is an amazing feature. If manufacturers/vendors were made aware that enough volume of users requested prices in a certain range for a part, they could build a sale around that and be able to reliably move enough units at that sale price! For example, if people built enough alerts to watch for a particular video card to fall around $300-$320, vendors that sell that video card could be given that data from PCPP to show them "hey, there's a lot of interest for this particular part for this price range" That's useful data for a vendor, I think!